


Transparence

by spider_fingers



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, a lot of hurt and no comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-15
Updated: 2017-11-15
Packaged: 2019-02-02 21:40:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12734841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spider_fingers/pseuds/spider_fingers
Summary: Sometimes the Void lets things through.





	Transparence

**Author's Note:**

> please read the end notes for extra warnings, mostly regarding a vaguely described sexual situation.

The blood is stark red and gleaming on his hands. They shake. He lets them.

(His skin is prickling with goosebumps, the damp of his prison cell sinking through his clothes like river water; the other prisoners mutter and curse. Mad beggars. The sound registers as a faraway whisper. It has been four months since they left him here.)

The blood is still there, a stain, incongruous. The rest of the world has been leeched of color. Dunwall has always been this way -- gray-black-white, drained, like the liminal depths of the ocean -- alien, after the sunlit effervescence of Karnaca. Coldridge is even more so.

Gray stone walls. Black mold. White sky overhead.

His red, red hands.

He closes his eyes, leaves his arms outstretched, palms open achingly wide like he's waiting to catch the rain. It rains often here. Whatever doesn't trickle out to the grates at the door gathers in the corners of his cell. He found a dead rat in the puddles once; it didn't stop him drinking from them, when the hunger dug too deep.

He closes his eyes and when they open again, the blood is gone.

(But he can still feel it, when he rubs his palms together to warm them, the grit rolling across his skin, wet and cold until it dries, until it flakes away, but never entirely. It's still there, like the cold, the cold seeping out from his bones. He will never be warm.)

 

*

 

He's running through the sewer tunnels (again? hasn't he done this before?), the stinking labyrinth underneath Dunwall Tower, his pants are soaked through with brackish water and he's leaving a trail of run-off behind him but it doesn't matter because he's not running from something (isn't he? or wasn't he?) but after and that something is a man in an insect mask, or a man with his face cut in half, or a man with a red-hot iron and the something caught in that man's arms is Emily and Emily is crying, softly, a low sobbing in his ear--

Corvo wakes with a full-body shudder.

He rolls upright, settles his feet on the floor. The boards almost feel warm. He's in the attic. The last floor of the Hound Pits Pub. Corvo had dropped into bed still wearing everything but his coat and his boots, and now the room smells thickly of mildew and mud. He thinks of taking a bath -- the hot water, the veiling steam, the being submerged -- throws off his shirt, and curls under the covers.

 

Later, he wakes in the Void. Even disjointed, dismembered, the blue world he sees is familiar.

 

*

 

“ _... the worst parts of him in shadow...”_

It sounds like the Outsider, a wind-whisper through the open window of the meeting room.

Curnow is gone. There was no point in him staying after Campbell's last, damning breath. Corvo crouches next to the High Overseer's swollen body; nothing like Sokolov's painting downstairs, where the overhang of his brow had cloaked his eyes in darkness (they shone like they were alive, flickering, in the light of the brazier--) and his mouth was a firm line, not slack, the teeth showing, to simper and wheedle, to crush, to drive him to obey--

The cuffs are too tight around his wrists. Restraining. His jaw is a knot of pain. He needs to go. He needs to leave. Now. Escape. Campbell's face stares back at him, that heckling glint in his eye. The hairs at his nape stand on end. Every inch of his skin feels like to strip away --

And in the next second it does. Fluttering apart. Paper-thin layers breaking off from him, flapping -- hundreds of moths -- he is an insect cloud -- he rises in a whirl of dust -- but the window is closed (wasn't it open?) and the door is open (wasn't it closed?) and through it come the villagers with their flaring torches and their cries of witch and they are burning him, burning him alive, he is living kindling and his every segment is withering to ash--

“What's--? Assassin! It's him!”

Voices break through. Corvo whirls, sword flashing out, cuts nothing -- weren't the villagers right here? But those aren't the faces of men: Overseer masks instead, and more following, and he is only one body again; not moths, and not chained to the interrogation chair.

Corvo sprints for the window.

 

*

 

_Weak,_ says Campbell, small-eyed and looming like a bogeyman. Corvo shrinks from him. The brazier sears at the edge of his vision, always just out of sight, and Campbell's left hand glows like hot iron.  _Weak, Corvo._ Campbell reaches out. Corvo closes his eyes. The skin of his face hisses and bubbles and his mouth is sealed shut and he cannot scream.

_Where is Emily, Corvo._ He shakes his head. He trembles. He wants it to stop -- the trembling -- but he can't, it's coming from too deep inside him, a helpless quaking, vibrating out to his fingertips.  _Tell us, where is Emily._ His hands clench and release on the arms of the chair.

_Sign the confession._ Campbell's face is in shadow. His mouth sags, drooling; Corvo can see the gums black and rotten behind his bloated lips.  _It's for a good cause. A good cause. Sign the confession, Corvo._

He shakes his head again, it swings from one side to the other, slow, dizzy with pain, and the sweat dripping down from his temple stings in the valley of the new burn. The air shivers, cold to hot, undecided. Campbell's face is a fetid pit; the High Overseer pulls down a mask, golden, sneeringly disgusted. Corvo looks into its dark, dark eyes. There is nothing behind them.

_Since you will not speak, heretic,_ says the mask,  _you have no need for your tongue._ Hands reach for his face -- the chair won't let him move back -- clamping fingers pry his jaws apart and rummage in his mouth and someone sobs, whimpers, begs incoherently around the hand like a gag and he can feel the tears leaving gummy tracks down his face, the snot and saliva crawling down his chin and then there is nothing but the crushing pressure of pain and

Corvo wakes.

He rolls onto his side and retches over the edge of the bed, but nothing comes up except spit, dripping messily on the floorboards, his gorge lodged high in his throat, feeling like a fist. His face is still wet, his eyes gritty and sore. He must have cried in his sleep.

(he never, never cried during the interrogations, never begged, never, he never--)

There is a strange weight in his mouth. It feels too full. Like there's something stuck inside. He spits and spits, but it remains.

 

“He spoke fine yesterday,” Cecelia whispers in the hall. Corvo no longer has to peep through keyholes; their silhouettes shine bright, indescribably light, through the shadow-veil walls of the servants' quarters. “Why do you think--?”

“Leave him,” Lydia answers, and leads the way into Havelock's room. They're changing the sheets, dusting the floor. Like yesterday. Like the day before. “He must be tired, the poor man. I hear they're sending him to the Golden Cat next.”

“Oh. Yes ma'am,” Cecelia says.

 

Martin's face is bare. Lined, haggard. The night must have been long for him. Corvo tries not to imagine his second face: gold against black cloth, unmoving. (A corpse would be less daunting. Just as still. Less yellow. He's seen too many now for them to strike fear in his heart.)

 

When he finds Emily on the last floor of the bathhouse, he says nothing. Blood stains his coat a blacker blue; but still he holds her close, and hums a rasping sound into her hair, and she hooks her arms tight around his neck like she wants to never let go.

 

*

 

Sokolov's house is a rat's-nest of architecture: overarching ceilings and disconnected walls and easily accessible corners, but Corvo risks falling asleep every time he stops in the structure's darker nooks -- so he keeps moving. He moves his tongue in his mouth while he waits. Reminds himself it's still there.

The guard on the landing leans over the railing, watches the others patrol below. The maids have already been removed; they lie propped up against the wall, tucked in the space over the guard station. Corvo slides to the floor, silent, and stalks toward the guard's unprotected back. The metal walkway turns to carpet. To his right, a painting of a frozen harbor, a whaling ship huge and black, beached like a whale. There is a wall to his left -- a wall, and just ahead, his back still turned, the guard.

Corvo hesitates

but doesn't: his feet carry him down the hall, his hand steadies his blade (wasn't-- wasn't it sheathed?). There is a strange, floating moment where he moves forward and, at the same time, like a breath taken twice, remains rooted in place -- and the moment breaks. To his left is empty space. To his right, two doorways. The floor rings metallic under his heel. The guard is turning.

Corvo freezes. His hands spasm to his weapons. The hallway floods back. He is moving: fluid, certain, stepping into the guard's space, left hand taking hold at the juncture between neck and shoulder, right hand solid around the grip of his sword, punching forward -- the whaling blade punctures the guard's belly -- slices up into his lung -- he gasps and his breath bubbles as his chest fills with blood -- his eyes are blue -- his mouth is terrified --

No. Brown eyes. Metal walkway. Two doors.

The guard is still bleeding out in his arms.

 

(He kills another, five minutes later: locks up in the middle of a passageway at the sound of approaching footsteps, fist clenching, expecting to become a swarm of soft insects -- rats boil out of the floor instead.

The three after that, though, who come running for the screams: those deaths are deliberate.)

 

*

 

Fireworks go off in the distance. It's happened every few minutes since Corvo arrived; he can hear them even over the weepers' dying garble.

He lays the bodies out on the filthy mattresses in the next room. Better than being left to rot where they fell. The words on the wall glow pale and bluish, softening the corpses' ravaged faces. A kind light. Corvo presses his fingers to their eyelids and closes their eyes.

_You don't look so well, dearie,_ he murmurs, his husband's face twisted and agonized under his hand, foam slithering sluggish down his weak chin.  _Finish your soup, there's a good man._

Corvo shakes his head. It's a woman's eyes he's closing. He backs away.

The shrine in the corner of the main room beckons; whispers, coaxes him closer, the rune resonating with the Void -- but he's so tired now. He could rest, a moment. Sit down in the purple halo of light. Close his own eyes. Let the watery whispers lull him half-awake, like waves, pulling him under. The room smells of the ocean. Salt spray. Fish. Old rot --

_You should smile,_ the man over him grunts, thrusting in again,  _ It's like you don't even appreciate this, _ and the old rage is surging up in his throat like vomit. He wants to bare his teeth and go for the throat. He deserves better than this -- better than this man, heavy on his hips, just awkward enough at the act to hate him for his mediocrity, this man with his runny eyes, demanding  _ appreciation _ \-- there is a low, throbbing ache between his legs where the man moves in erratic stabs of his hips -- and he  _ hates _ this --

He looks into his husband's poached-egg eyes and lets a smile crawl up his face. The man smiles back, looking nervous now. Hesitates.

Yes. Be afraid. In a fortnight you will be dead. He will boil his husband soft and tender and everything he has never been, and he will flay the flesh from his bones, and those bones will learn to sing, and he will finally have a use --

Corvo startles upright; the bird that woke him flies off in a clatter of wings, cawing wildly. He can feel his heart beating hard in his own throat. He claws back his unkempt hair from his face, and his hand comes away cold with sweat. There's a strange taste in his mouth -- he checks, passes his tongue over the inside of his cheeks, but he hasn't bitten himself. Still, it lingers.

(Like blood. Or fresh meat.)

 

*

 

Hiram Burrows' stone-set face has invaded the city and the halls of Dunwall Tower, but here, in the golden room where she used to sleep, Jessamine's watches over the harp and piano.

Sokolov painted her too stern, Corvo thinks. He doesn't remember her arms so thin, or her eyes so lifeless. Even her clothes seem stiffer. Starched. Funereal. The rooftops of Dunwall are dark behind her shoulder, rain-blue, a mourning color. It makes the room feel colder.

He didn't kill the guards in here. They lie still and quiet and living in the connecting corridor. It would have felt wrong, with her watching, to stain the floorboards red.

 

Burrows' personal retinue is dead; the Tall Boy dismantled, bleeding on the floor below. Corvo has Burrows himself bent back over his war room table. His board pieces are scattered on the ground, his papers crumpled and strewn in an arc under his back. What comes out of his mouth is an incoherent jumble of apologies and threats.

Corvo's sword unfolds. His eyes are dark and fathomless. The mask, torn away in Burrows' initial struggle to escape, is somewhere behind him. It doesn't matter. The mire of fear he can see in Burrows' wide, desperate eyes -- that matters. He presses the tip of his blade to the Lord Regent's stomach.

He pushes in. Jessamine gasps. Her hands claw at his arm. She falls away.

His sword is red, wet, leaves a spatter across the floor as it withdraws, and the gush of arterial blood soaks his sleeve, leaves his hand red too. He can smell the river on the wind through the open window (so strong, too strong, how can it smell like this so far above the surface) and that wind is searing cold and there is a thunder in his ears, a drowning-out of sound. Jessamine is on the ground. Her hair has come partly undone. The pool spreading under her is dark as the Void.

He rolls her over. Dead eyes.  _ What has been done to me, _ she whispers from the place nearest his heart.

Corvo stands. The Lord Regent is dead at his feet. He looks down and Jessamine stares silently back from cloudy blue eyes. His left hand sings. His red right hand burns and itches.

Her cold, echoing voice follows him as he leaps into the moat. Hagfish latch on to his blood-soaked coat, his burning hand, and he heaves himself dripping onto the flagstones of the courtyard, monstrous and bedraggled, and shoots both of the guards shouting to raise the alarm. He runs. His left hand thrums with power. He is a dashing speck of light -- and still her voice follows, chasing, a whisper in his ear, so close, so close, and it says,

_am I meant to forgive_

_what has been done to me?_

 

*

 

Nausea makes his stomach clench in waves. He'd slept in Samuel's boat on the return trip, short minute-long fits, his hammering heart wrenching him to wakefulness before Jessamine's eyes could come into focus in the dark -- but still his whole body drags with exhaustion, even standing still, his glass of whiskey almost sagging out of his hand more than once.

Pendleton gives him a wide berth, keeping a minimum of distance between them; Martin gave him the glass, a sallow smile on his face. It must be the blood still soaking through his clothes. He didn't have the time to change before the... party, and by now he must be starting to reek, offal and river water, mud and rot, treachery. Jessamine glares out from every reflection in the corner of his eye; he only has to turn to see that she's not there. He doesn't. It's almost a comfort to think she lingers in the shadows, even angry. (Even betrayed.)

His hands ache and tremble, still red despite the scrubbing -- he'd scratched right through the skin -- and the folding blade is gone. He must have dropped it, he thinks, on his flight from Dunwall Tower.

Emily is quiet beside him. He strokes back her hair, but she's intensely focused on her drawing, slicing harsh black lines across the paper. Her feet swing absently underneath the table. They bump into his boots every so often. Her eyes flick in his direction every time another surge of dizzy nausea leaves him shivering.

“Corvo,” she says, and he turns to look at her.

Emily screams. She's struggling like a feral animal -- yowling, baring her teeth, fingers scratching for soft spots to sink into, and he's throwing her to one of his crew --

_ Corvo! _ she's crying, “Corvo?” He blinks. The music is still playing, quietly dissonant. “Did you hear what I said?”

His heartbeat is a slow sick thing in his chest. Another nauseous wave submerges him and passes.

“I'm sorry, Emily,” he murmurs. “I think I'm going to bed.”

 

*

 

Corvo's body wants to collapse. The rest of him is beyond listening to the urge.

He can still feel the poison burning through him, an incandescent knot of pain in his gut, and his last few sleepless nights in the pounding of his head. His vision blurs intermittently when his heart hiccups in his chest. It turns the Whalers' masks to insect faces, chitinous and black-eyed. He ends them without remorse.

His path ran straight to their hideout in the Chamber of Commerce; he has no need for his weapons, his missing sword, when the whaling blade he picked up by the holding cells suffices. It's a little heavier in his grasp. Strange. He remembers using it so fluidly in the gazebo.

Below him, limned in gold, the last Whaler guard dog watches over his master. Corvo drops down, removes the man's head, and in a blink of light appears behind Daud and runs the assassin through.

(They've been calling  _ him _ an assassin, too, from the beginning. A killer for hire. All their words, about not believing he was the one who murdered-- He murdered her -- she's dead -- she died by his red, red hand --)

“W-What?” Daud is saying, gasping shallow breaths in, and Corvo realizes his own mouth is moving, whispering, the words grating in his ravaged throat,

“I killed her, I killed her, I killed her,”

his hand trembling on the sword's grip. Daud has wrapped both hands around the blood-wet blade sticking out of him. This close, Corvo can hear him swallow down a cry of pain.

“Killed who?” Daud manages, voice fumbling.

Corvo's arm unwinds from around his neck. “Forgive me,” he's saying, and Jessamine's voice echoes,  _ how, how can I forgive, _ and he leaves Daud in a broken, still breathing heap on the floor of his ruined home, surrounded by cooling corpses.

 

*

 

Corvo stumbles out of the tunnel below the Chamber of Commerce into a swarm of rats.

Their teeth dig in to the bone, savage and hateful and he tears them apart in a shattering howl of wind, scattering flecks of bone and viscera. His mouth is wet with it. He wipes it away.

He grabs an old pear off a table, bites down to the core. It tastes of nothing but ash. The air smells like that, too -- old ash, from when they must have still been trying to burn away the dead. The district is gray and cold now. Cinders. Already consumed. The first survivor he comes across backs away in horror at the sight of him, reaching for his belt, yelling, “Weeper!” so Corvo knocks his head into the ground until he goes quiet. He can't have the Tall Boys coming down on him.

He touches the skin below his eyes and his fingers come away gritty and brown. Has he been crying? He doesn't remember.

 

The Bottle Street boy in the sewers rears back, too, but instead of screaming he asks, “You a weeper?”

Corvo shakes his head. His throat is still sore, his skull pounding with the force of his heartbeat. Beyond the sewer gate, the living dead shamble unevenly around, rough voices and buzzing with insects; he parts their throats with the Bottle Street boy's knife and leaves them for the rats. Cleaner that way. Corvo finds himself scratching at the blood drying on his face, nails digging into the skin. A shrill whine of a sound is starting up in his ear. He doesn't have much time. Emily needs him. She needs him back with her _now._

He keeps moving. Rats scurry at his feet. His clothes trail water in his wake and drag at him, like weights tied to his ankles and wrists. His face is wet, too. Drops slide from the clumps of his lashes and run warm down his face. His breathing grates.

A feeble cough starts up in his chest, but he's too sore, too drained to put energy into it, and it ends in a wheezing fit. The door to Cecelia's abandoned flat -- he can see it, eyes locked forward, every cell in him moving in its direction -- he only needs to cross it --

The cough starts up again, stronger. His rat nuzzles into his neck, whiskers tickling his jaw. He can taste the iron in his own mouth. It's okay: he has a friend with him. He's grateful for that. His rat stands up on his shoulder, then climbs prickle-clawed down to his pocket.

Corvo sags, stumbles, jostles the door in its frame. His left hand flickers like a guttering flame, stings sharp all the way up his arm. He's dizzy with it. Shadows are crawling out of the cracks in the walls.

He lets the tears run freely, sticky and hot, turning his vision red. The next coughing fit heaves him upright, every tired muscle in him clenching like a fist, curling him up on himself like a pillbug. Blood spatters the arm he'd put up as a shield. His nose runs; bleeding too, maybe. It's supposed to be quick. He hopes the rumors are right

(but they're not, are they? he's seen them, with their scabbed eyelids, their weak and wheezing breaths, wandering for days while their bodies wind down, while the flies nest in their skin, until they drop and convulse, and he still has hours before the fever breaks his memory and consciousness down to parts --)

and that he'll be dead soon. He breathes out. He waits.

“-- Corvo --?” comes the fearful whisper through the door, and Corvo gasps, gulping air. His heart beats frantic -- thin and rapid and _dying_ \-- and there are rats swarming on the ground, leaking from the walls and the gutter like damp, milling around him, a skittering maelstrom -- his left hand sparking like damaged wiring --

He eats the white ones first.

The shrieking of the rats crescendoes to a ghastly wail, and then they rush back down a sewer grate in a great, chittering stream, dispersing to the folds of the Void they crawled from. Corvo's face is filthy with blood. He can't feel the headache, or the whining in his ear, or his own battering heart.

Cecelia opens the door. She looks torn between cautious relief and the need to run away.

“Corvo?” she's saying, pushing the door wider. “We thought you were dead.”

Corvo looks at her and thinks, _Aren't I?_

 

*

 

There is nothing he can do but move forward. Emily is somewhere ahead of him. She must be tired. Scared. Alone. He has to reach her -- that certainty gets him all the way to Piero's workshop. Below, he can hear the two inventors talking, the words distant and incomprehensible. He heads down the stairs. His feet make no sound on the steps.

They see him anyway once he passes the drill, come forward with open arms and hope like a fever in their eyes. Corvo sags, black thoughts stirring at the back of his mind. A third of the city dead, they said. From here it seems the whole of it is a charnel pit.

Neither Anton nor Piero pay his quiet any mind. They urge him, and he obeys, if only to have something to move toward. He is a ghost drifting through the alehouse. In Havelock's room, he kills a soldier on automatic, unsheathes the sword from the man's belt and guts him with it; the blueprints are in the garbage. He takes them. His boots leave wet prints in his wake, still dripping.

Piero praises him, holds the blueprints up like a squalling newborn, and gets to work. Corvo helps. When they ask him what to do with the guards left in the yard, he says it doesn't matter.

(what can it matter? he is an unmoored spirit, they all are, fighting in the ruined carcass of a city. he wonders if they can hear their own heartbeats. if they're too proud to smell the blood on their clothes--)

Piero and Anton share a look.

“We'll knock them out, then,” Piero says, decisive, and after -- after the lightning surge, after the sound of a dozen bodies hitting the ground -- Piero turns to him and puts a hand on his shoulder. “Corvo,” he says, “I remember talking to Samuel about a system of long-distance communication, to be set up in the tower. You're looking for Emily, aren't you? Signal Samuel. He'll take you where you need to go.”

“Emily's on Kingsparrow,” Corvo says, and stays rooted in place. He feels flat, depthless; so lacking in substance it's become a searing emptiness. There is a little worried line settling between Piero's brows.

“Yes,” he says. “Samuel can take you there. Here, follow-- follow me. The device is in the tower.”

Piero activates the flare launcher, and points to the distantly approaching figure of a boat downriver. Corvo watches in trepidation.

(he's losing so much. everything he knew.)

Samuel's face is dour and unwelcoming, but Emily's name sets his mouth with determination. Exhaustion is a physical weight tied to Corvo's neck.

A third of the city? No -- the whole thing is a graveyard. Soon it will only be dirt and crumbling stone.

 

*

 

Corvo expects the loathing in Samuel's eyes. He might even have expected the warning shot.

He doesn't expect the pain of the guard's bullet shattering his rib.

It punches the breath and all thought out of him -- the dead soldier's sword is in his hand -- a severed head rolls to a stop at his feet. He looks down. He is drenched red up to the elbow. It's fitting, he supposes, that this ends the way it started. Corvo walks over the bodies with no mind for the sound of broken bones grating.

He gets in through the outflow pipe. The patrolling guards go quiet under his blade; he discards them. Outside, in the nettling rain, Martin and Pendleton scream at each other across the yard. Gunshots. Mockery. They are making a farce of the city's death throes.

So Corvo shoots Martin as he's leaving the courtyard, the Bottle Street gun steady in his blood-slick hand, and blinks up to where the nobleman's voice had echoed from. The guard captain cries out in surprise, then in pain, the stump of his hand pulsing blood across the metal floor. Pendleton is already dying -- the rat-faced coward looks up at him, laughs -- already dead, maybe. Corvo moves on.

(he is moving toward a fixed point, the center of his descending spiral, the peak of the gyre -- Emily -- Emily -- and he dreads to know what he will find. what will he do if she calls his name? so many dead. she is only a little girl.)

He takes the stairway, the elevator; the top of the lighthouse is a morass of clouds. No guard can stop him. His sword cleaves every obstacle in two. He's running now: the effort is an acid burn in his legs, in the garotte wire tension of his arm; dim gray splendor rushes by as he chases the shadow of his mark. He bursts back out into the storm -- the rain pours fit to drown a man, falling in waves -- then the cold shelter of the lighthouse's highest point. Havelock is loud over the cacophony of water. Emily is louder.

Corvo lunges up the metal staircase, feet pounding and rattling the steps. Havelock turns. His skull pops wetly open -- and he tumbles off the platform, the pistol smoking in Corvo's hand, and Emily falls and she screams --

“Corvo!”

His heart is a pinprick behind his aching ribs.

(why her? she was only a little girl. his little girl. only everything in the world.)

Corvo sinks to his knees at the edge of the platform, where she struggles to climb back up, hands scrabbling for purchase, reaching for his, only bare inches away.

“Corvo --” she gasps, choking on rain, “Help me!”

(how long did she fight, here at the end of the universe, before falling? falling like everyone before her. he remembers Jessamine telling him she had his eyes. he looks down. she still does. dead eyes, just like him. just like her mother's.)

“Corvo--!” she cries, and throws herself forward -- and that was the last, because now she slips down, further, dangling one-handed, and then she's gone. The wind howls through the railing.

 

*

 

“The right man,” the Outsider says, “to send it over the edge.”

Corvo looks out to the fractured segments of his city below him, the hollow of his chest crowded with ghosts -- the dead, the dying, the broken remains -- and feels nothing.

 

**Author's Note:**

> warning re: that sexual situation: basically marital "duties" being pretty dub-con? also the whole mess of it being someone else's experience, which makes it doubly dub-con? difficult to describe and warn for.


End file.
